Population health : concepts and methods

This book is organized around the logical sequence of studying and attempting to improve the health of populations. Population health encompasses traditional public health and preventive medicine but emphasizes the full range of health determinants affecting the entire population and emphasises the importance of social and cultural factors in practice and research. The second edition incorporates many new topics that reflect changes in contemporary public health concerns and our response to them; as well as shifts in research directions. These include: lifecourse approaches to health, gene-environment interactions, emergent infections, and bioterrorism. Among the specific changes are new or expanded discussions of confidence intervals for commonly used rates, the impact of population ageing on mortality trends, health survey questionnaires, summary measures of population health, the new International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, migrant studies, race and ethnicity, psychoneuroendocrine pathways, social epidemiology, risk perception, communicating the SARS epidemic, ecologic studies, the odds radio, participatory research, suicide, evidence-based community interventions, evaluation methods and health economics, the Cochrane Collaboration, and systemic reviews.